The Nine Core Business Systems
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 8
- Confidence
- —
Matt Gray's method for taking a business past the plateau by turning the customer journey into a small number of named systems rather than a black box of tasks. You walk the journey a single customer takes — from first touch through lead magnet, newsletter, funnel, sales, delivery and finance — and give each stage a name, a documented source of truth, one accountable owner, and one core metric with a target. Everything then rolls into a single dashboard so the CEO can see the health of the business at a glance. The framing principle is the 80/20 rule: systemise the 20% of the business that removes 80% of the headaches, and finish the existing foundation before launching anything new. Most of the work is amalgamating and simplifying what already exists, not building something net new.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Walk the journey in the customer's shoes
Describe out loud one concrete path a customer takes, from the moment they first see you through to purchase, delivery and referral. Do not start from your org chart — start from their experience.
Pro tip Say it out loud to someone else. The stages fall out of the narration far faster than they do from a whiteboard.
- 2
Name each stage as a system
Convert each stage of that narration into a named system — traffic/content, lead magnet, newsletter, funnel, sales, delivery/customer success, finance, dashboard. Naming is what turns an amorphous mess into something manageable.
Pro tip Aim for roughly nine. Fewer and the systems are too vague to own; many more and you are systemising minutiae.
Watch out Sub-channels (social, shorts) usually sit under a parent system rather than becoming their own.
- 3
Apply the 80/20 filter before you build
Ask which 20% of the business, once systemised, removes 80% of the headaches. Fix the existing foundation before you launch a new product line, or the old business breaks while the new one is being built.
Watch out Launching a new offer on top of an unsystemised business is a common route to burnout and to both ends collapsing at once.
- 4
Document each system in one source of truth
Every system gets written down in the same place — Notion, a wiki, Google Docs, it doesn't matter which, only that it is the same one. Documentation is what lets you leave the system alone.
Pro tip Default to copy-and-paste from what already exists; this is a simplification and consolidation exercise, not a creation exercise.
- 5
Assign exactly one owner per system
Each system needs a single named accountable person — the one who can end a disagreement by saying 'I respect both directions, we're doing this.' Sub-owners can exist under them for smaller parts.
Pro tip Where ownership is unclear, get every stakeholder in one room and decide the core owner explicitly rather than letting it stay ambient.
Watch out Two or three aligned-but-not-identical stakeholders is functionally no owner; they swim in different directions.
- 6
Define one core metric per system
Keep it simple: lead magnet system = weekly leads, newsletter = open or click-through rate, funnel = lead-to-customer conversion or revenue, sales = revenue, customer success = upsells, testimonials, referrals.
Pro tip Where you have no data, back-of-envelope it: take the last three months' actuals and set a reasonable growth rate.
- 7
Set targets and stretch goals against each metric
Give each owner an actual and a target — for example, moving lead magnet conversion from a steady 10% of viewers to 13%, or holding open rate at 50%. Compound that over a year to see what it is worth.
Pro tip Some metrics are better expressed as a state than a number, e.g. 'there is always a 12-week newsletter calendar built'.
- 8
Roll every metric into one dashboard and review weekly
Put the core metrics of all nine systems into a single scorecard with dates as columns and metrics as rows, colour-coded against target, so the whole business is legible in one scroll. Anything red for two weeks becomes an issue at the weekly leadership meeting.
Pro tip Label each row with its owner, and have owners comment in-line whenever a number is unusually high or low.
Watch out Expect several versions before the metric set feels right — this is refinement over time, not a lightbulb moment.
In the wild
Ali's business had lead magnets scattered across ScoreApp pages, ConvertKit landing pages and one-off video-specific offers — the Trident calendar method, the Castle method, quizzes, journaling templates. It felt amorphous. A team member who had run the podcast for two years was moved onto it as the single owner, told to take courses, read books and talk to people until she was up to speed on email. She built a Notion database of every lead magnet and now leads decisions on which new ones to build and why. The stage that had felt like scattered tactics became one named system with a source of truth and an owner.
→ A previously scattered set of tactics became a documented, owned system with its own database and roadmap.
Between a marketing lead, a head of product and a sales/RevOps person, Ali could not say who owned the funnel. The team had just moved to HubSpot and was stuck debating whether to pipe every newsletter subscriber, every hand-raiser, or only official leads into it because of cost. Matt's diagnosis was not the HubSpot question but the missing owner: several aligned stakeholders sometimes swimming in different directions. The fix was to get everyone in a room, name one core owner with sub-owners beneath, and set the metric as lead-to-customer conversion plus revenue, broken down by product tier.
→ The ambiguity was identified as a systems-ownership problem rather than a tooling decision, with a clear resolution path.
Common mistakes
Launching the new offer before the old one is systemised
Starting a second product line while the first is still held together by hand means burning the candle at both ends: the new launch consumes attention exactly when the existing business needs it, and both start to fall apart. Finish the foundation first so the existing machine buys you the freedom to build.
Several aligned stakeholders instead of one owner
When two or three good people share a system, they are usually generally aligned but occasionally rowing in different directions, and nobody can end a disagreement. Every system needs one person who can say 'I respect both these directions, but we're doing this' — and that person should not be the founder.
Tracking metrics no one owns
A scorecard full of numbers with no named owner and no target produces data, not decisions. Each metric should map to one system, one owner and one target so that a red cell immediately implies who acts and on what.
From the transcript
“over the years I've learned that there's you know there's systems and that success is really an OS”
“what's like the 20% of the business we can systemize to reduce like 80% of the headaches”
“again having what's the source of Truth and for you I think it's notion the second aspect is then who's the owner and then what's…”
From the episode
Scale Your Business From $10k to $100k Per Month - Matt Gray
Matt Gray